Solid Workers

In the annals of video gaming, how many titles put you right at the end of the prequel game? A handful to be sure, and the only one parading the stage during our passage through games old and new is Super Metroid . Which is an interesting happenstance, because there are a number of mechanics it shares with another game picking up where its predecessor left off: Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap . Published in 1989 for the Master System and subsequently appearing on the Game Gear, the PC Engine (under a different name) and getting a latter day reskin for the Switch, PS4, and XBox One in 2017, in the pantheon of Sega-sourced mascots the Wonder Boy series of games have tended to get outshone by a certain other character . Nevertheless, the broad consensus among professional reviewers of the day placed Dragon's Trap the nearest the Master System had to a Super Mario game in terms of depth, making it easily one of the best games the machine had to offer. Not to be confused with ...

I remember well seeing Sonic the Hedgehog running for the first time. It was at a long defunct Japanese import emporium in Derby, it was on the MegaDrive, and it looked every bit as pretty as the magazine screenshots promised. I just had to have it, and at some point in the Autumn of 1991 that's exactly what happened - for the princely sum of £34.99 it became the third game added to my trusty collection, where it resides to this day along with the first two . Much fun was had to the point where my brother developed a deathly obsession, going into debug mode and playing it in every way it was never intended to be. And then came something of a surprise. This supposed MegaDrive exclusive conceived to trounce Nintendo's Mario and sell the machine, which it did (for a time) ended up getting an outing on the Sega Master System. And, truth be told, it was well worth the effort. Naturally, Sonic in its new surrounds could not match the premium product of Sega's flagship console...

Consider the tank. Great clunking machines swathed in armour plating, and a big gun for shooting things. Ideal fodder for video games you might think. And indeed, a number of arcade and simulator titles have gone off and run with it. Top view, first person view, these are the most sensible ways of rendering tank combat in digital form. See Battlezone , M-1 Abrams , and Granada , for example. Much rarer is a tank game as a horizontally-scrolling affair. And rarer still is to keep the side on view and, um, place the tank in a platform game. Yet this is exactly what SunSoft did with Blaster Master , one of the most beloved and consistently praised games in the old Nintendo library. As you might imagine, platforming in a tank lends the game to some quite unusual features. And so it proves. The most stark of which are the two game modes. On the one hand there's your huge levels with plenty to discover and few hidden power ups to find, and then there's ... when you get out of the tan...

How do you replicate the table top role playing game experience on computers, game consoles, and arcade machines? In the early 1980s this was a question many a game designer, programmer, studio and software house grappled with. Some went about it with the semi-faithful rendering of RPG mechanics, involving character generation, levelling and experience, and random monster battles part-based on numeric attributes. Others decided to dispense with this completely. One stand out title in the latter genre, and a precursor of the loot 'em ups that came later was Atari's Gauntlet and its sequels. The principle of Gauntlet and the imaginatively-titled Gauntlet II , which is our concern for this evening, is simple. You or a bunch of mates pick one character class - a warrior, a valkyrie, a wizard, or an elf - which have their own unique abilities, just like the player character system from jolly old Dungeons & Dragons . The warrior is hard and one-shots everything, the valkyrie h...

What happens when the living dead prove more culturally virulent than an outbreak of zombie flu? You get a long-running TV franchise , many an imitator, films and, of course, video games. And so it came to pass that Sony's latest flagship release for the PlayStation 4, Days Gone is an open world zombie survival affair. You just can't get away from the damn things. For the uninitiated, Days Gone casts you as Deacon St John, a drifter and former biker eking a living out of the virus-blasted backwoods of Oregon with his partner-in-crime, Boozer. The game is set two years after disease swept the world killing billions of people, including almost all children, and turning a good chunk of the survivors into Freaks - mindless and hyper-aggressive, um, zombies. They are alive, but like the infected from 28 Days Later have no vestiges of humanity left. What passes for remaining civilisation huddles around fortified encampments and hoping the huge hoards Freaks tend to congregate in ...

Brexit doesn't have to suck the life out of everything else. Well, not when there's a brief interregnum in proceedings anyway. And besides, Hellfire - a beloved slice of early 90s nostalgia - is suddenly on point with its narrative of taking wing against a robotic tyrant and its works. Code the evil Super Mech as either Theresa May or the Brussels machinery, Hellfire is a game whose ideological coding can suit everyone! Okay, clumsy segue side there's absolutely no special reason for a reflection on Hellfire to appear now or at any time, except as writing for writing's sake. Shall we get to it? For those unfamiliar with the 16-bit console wars of almost 30 years ago (sniff), the MegaDrive had its Super Nintendo rival licked on shooters. With the odd notable exception , Sega's machine was overflowing with space-based shooting action. You could put it down to a paucity of original thinking, just as nearly every other game released on Nintendo's eight bit system...